9 Bad Actors Who Have Recently Given Oscar Worthy Performances

Bad actors: sometimes you just have to wonder what they're doing in movies in the first place. How they got there, how they continue to be employed and how Hollywood sees fit to carry on funding their lifestyles when there are undoubtedly far better performers out there that haven't even made it yet. But maybe Hollywood keeps the bad actors around for a reason - perhaps it's the hope that, some day, they'll manage to surprise audiences with a knockout turn, even if it's just for that one time. Look at mumbling bruiser Sylvester Stallone, who gives the all-time greats a run for their money in Copland; or Sharon Stone, blowing all her other performances out of the water in Casino. Stone received an Oscar nomination for her Casino role, the Academy at last electing to endorse the actress after a lifetime of below-par performances, perhaps realizing she'd never get the chance again. There aren't ever enough Oscar noms to go around, however, and more often than not those bad actors won't find the Oscar praise that's always eluded them, despite managing to finally prove themselves. More recently, a handful of actors that nobody ever thought to expect much from delivered surprisingly stunning work, only to be roundly ignored by the Academy. Here are nine of those usually bad actors, who are fully deserving of Oscars for their recent movies. 9) Shia LaBeouf - Fury That Shia LaBeouf, eh? Like a mix of a parody of Tom Hardy and a less-productive James Franco, LaBeouf is both an intensely angry method actor and a kind of meta-person that's managed to turn his own life into an art installation. Despite all his headline-grabbing role preparation, LaBeouf has largely failed to channel it through his performances, all of which have been virtually identical since his Transformers days. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Lawless, The Company You Keep, Charlie Countryman - all have LaBeouf playing basically the same character, only with a slightly different haircut. But then you have Fury. David Ayer's brutal WWII ensemble tank drama features the performance that anyone who ever had faith in Shia LaBeouf had been waiting for. The actor's dedication reached new heights, seeing him train, mutilate himself and refuse to bathe in order to get into character, only this time it paid off - LaBeouf inhabits the role of a tank-gunner close to mental and physical collapse so truly that he could bring you to tears by the time his third-act fate has been sealed. 8) James Franco - Spring Breakers Has anybody thought to tell James Franco lately that if he's more selective with his projects, his overall quality control might go up? If he's not falling asleep at the Oscars, Franco's writing a book, painting a picture, making some music, teaching a lecture, directing a movie or, occasionally, doing some acting. The thing is that Franco now has so much going on, that when he gets around to actually doing his main job he's uninspired, detached almost to the point of boredom - a long way from that Oscar nom for 127 Hours. Franco's currently starring in more films than ever, but it's difficult to even notice him when he's going through the motions so hard; Spring Breakers very much excepted, of course. There's rarely been a better case of an actor breaking type in the last few years than James Franco playing a gold-toothed, corn-rowed, bling-obsessed rapper and self-confessed gangsta in Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers. The film is beautifully so-so, until Franco comes along doing something you've never seen from him before, elevating the film to ridiculous art. 7) Jeremy Irvine - The Railway Man Jonathan Teplitzky's post-WWII saga The Railway Man came and went with nary much audience interest in 2014, almost as though the whole recent Colin Firth fad had died. In the film, Firth stars as Eric Lomax, a former soldier who survived the brutality of life in a Japanese POW camp; the younger Eric is played by Jeremy Irvine. Anyone who's seen the execrable War Horse or dreary teen drama Now Is Good will probably about now find themselves groaning in a kind of existential agony; if Colin Firth wasn't boring enough, you might be thinking, they just had to go and hire Jeremy Irvine to play Firth's younger self. Only, Irvine is surprisingly great in The Railway Man. Not just great, but uncannily reminiscent of Firth as well, Irvine helping you forget the fact the two actors look nothing like each other by mimicking Firth's mannerisms and speech patterns to a T. The young Eric is just a flashback from the main story, but he ends up becoming the most compelling part of the movie in Irvine's hands, as the usually unremarkable actor underplays the resolute and rational Brit to the point of tragedy. 6) Zac Efron - Neighbors Really, how can anyone not hate Zac Efron? He's young, rich, supernaturally good-looking and a hit with women everywhere, and the sole reason he's famous is because of an infuriating musical franchise in which he sings, dances and shows off hardly any acting talent whatsoever. Neighbors changed the Disney perception of Efron for many people though, and not just because they respected him for starring in a movie that completely obliterated his squeaky-clean image. Efron is, ahead of comedy stalwarts Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne (also great), the MVP of this film, taking the frat boy stereotype and humanizing it just enough to make you care, even while he's being an absolute nightmare. Unfortunately, they don't give out Oscars for comedy roles, not even in the supporting categories, so Efron was never in with a chance. That doesn't mean his turn in Neighbors wasn't one of the best of 2014 though, as it was an uproariously funny display of adolescent braggadocio and improv'd dick jokes. 5) Jason Statham - Spy Another oft-derided actor, another unexpected comedy volte-face. They may still be months away from deciding who gets what Oscar nominations this year, but you can leave Jason Statham out of the running right now, even if he, like Zac Efron, showed off unforeseen comedy chops in Spy that saw him walking away with the entire movie. Jason Statham isn't what you would call an 'actor with range,' unless you consider an array of (admittedly impressive) fighting skills the mark of a great chameleon. He can't even change accent, never mind performance style; it's gotten to the point where Hollywood has just stopped trying to explain why Statham's ostensibly American characters all speak like they're from Wapping. In Spy, Statham is arguably no different than usual. Only this time, the tough guy persona is played for laughs, and in the process of dialling his aggressive charisma up to 11 and beyond, Statham becomes some kind of comedy genius, spitting lines like, "Nothing kills me, I'm immune to 179 different types of poison," as though this is the kind of thing he should have been doing all his acting life. 4) Dwayne Johnson - Pain & Gain First, a bit of preamble: Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson isn't necessarily a bad actor. It's just that he's spent most of his career to date in films like The Scorpion King, GI Joe: Retaliation, San Andreas and the Fast & Furious movies - all projects that play on his image as an action hero and give him little room to maneuver as an actual, bona fide actor. In some non-blockbuster movies, Johnson has shown signs of potential - it's basically only a cameo, but in The Other Guys he's a scene-stealer - and nowhere has the former Rocky Maivia shone brighter than in Pain & Gain. Meaning in all the places he could have given an Oscar-worthy turn, Johnson did it in a Michael Bay crime-comedy about body-builders. It's not just that Pain & Gain allows Johnson to show off a superb comic timing only glimpsed previously - the film also sees Johnson make a naive, pathetic yet still scary figure out of a potentially one-dimensional, coke-addicted ex-con. The film's tonally all over the place, but Johnson aims straight and true in easily his best dramatic performance so far. 3) Hugh Grant - Cloud Atlas It's evidently not easy to pull off a dual role, though many actors have attempted it. There are even some heroic thesps out there who have tried to take on multiple roles in single movies, despite the best efforts of Mike Myers and Eddie Murphy selfishly trying to ruin the appeal of that approach. In Cloud Atlas, Tom Tykwer and the Wachowskis' mind-frazzlingly ambitious sci-fi whatsit, multiple actors take on multiple roles across multiple timelines and multiple settings, to the point where you're mainly just playing the game of trying to figure out which actor's playing what character. Without question the most successful cast member, Hugh Grant is so good in Cloud Atlas that he makes it look like hopping seamlessly from 19th-century American slaver, to British pensioner, to cannibalistic chieftain is easy. As with comedy, science fiction is a hard sell for Oscar voters - Cloud Atlas got nothing from the Academy, but that doesn't mean Grant wasn't a revelation in it. Often painted as someone who can only play a stiff-upper-lip Englishman, in this one movie Grant reveals more range than he has in his entire career. 2) Robert Pattinson - The Rover It doesn't matter what Robert Pattinson does now - he's never going to be able to escape the Twilight label. He'll never shake off the image of himself as a pouting, bouffant-haired bloodsucker, a heart throb to teenage girls everywhere despite the apparent lack of any discernible acting ability. Pattinson has branched out since his Twilight days, making a couple of films with David Cronenberg and another with Hunger Games director Francis Lawrence, but even in those Pattinson remains cold and inexpressive. Then, just last year, came David Michod's The Rover, and with it a performance of unnerving vulnerability from Pattinson. In The Rover, Pattinson plays a mentally-handicapped criminal, roaming a post-apocalyptic landscape alongside Guy Pearce's fearsome avenging angel. He's the supporting act, but Pattinson steals the movie from under the more experienced Pearce, by stripping away those stubborn layers to finally reveal the melancholy soul beneath. 1) Nicolas Cage - Joe Is Nicolas Cage really a bad actor? Is he even really an actor? The self-proclaimed king of the 'nouveau shamanic' school of acting (he invented it, perfected it, and as far as anyone can tell is the only one who implements it), Cage has been doing many a wild and freaky thing on-screen these past few years, but nobody really seems to know how to classify much of it. Even most of the contemporary performances of Cage's that critics consider to be great are now completely OTT (see: Bad Lieutenant, Kick-Ass), like the actor's stuck in a perpetual game of one-upmanship with himself. Not so in David Gordon Green's Joe though, which brings Cage down to earth, gives him a beard and a beer gut, and encourages him to give one of his most affecting performances ever. There's nothing artificial about Cage in Joe, in which he plays the titular Texas loner, prone to uncontrollable rages and a desperate, lingering sadness. It's a genuine, lived-in performance, and Cage hasn't been this good since Leaving Las Vegas, all of 20 years ago.

9 Bad Actors Who Have Recently Given Oscar Worthy Performances

7) Jeremy Irvine – The Railway Man